The sunsets right now seem like they’re apologizing for the rest of the year. They are totally glorious—pink and orange, purple and gold. The sky seems to hollow out and give me extra room to breathe. Even tonight, when the sunset is bands of whites and grays, there is something that seems different about it then during the rest of the year. In the winter, the low angle of the sun stretches out the sunset, giving us more time to watch the light linger on the cloudscape. This more leisurely change of light, along with generally drier air and fewer particles in the atmosphere, as NOAA meteorologist Stephen Corfidi told Voxlast year, gives this season its striking sunsets. The shorter days, too, have given me the chance to see the sun’s arrival and departure. It rises right now just around seven in the morning, and sets before five, hours where it’s easy for me to be awake and looking at the sky. Elsewhere, the days are even shorter, with even fewer hours in between the beginning of the light and the end. Now the sunrise and sunset feel more like bookends to the day than in other seasons. Maybe because the hours in between feel like something to be survived, sometimes. Maybe because I never know what each new day will bring—not that I ever did, but I thought I did. Starting and ending each day with the sun reminds me of another of my current obsessions, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and his Poetry Unbound podcast. At the beginning of the podcast, he reads a poem. Then he spends some time discussing the poem. And then, at the end, he reads it again. It’s not the same recording of the poem, played twice. It’s the same poem, the same voice, but different. There are always subtle differences in how Ó Tuama reads the poem the second time. I hear it differently, too. I hear it after learning more about the poet, about their background, about what they might be aiming toward. I hear it after hearing Ó Tuama’s music—I meant to write “musings” right then, but the spell-check had other, better ideas—about what the poem might mean to him, to others, in the context of the world and of the room where I sit. The poem is something else now, on the second reading. It means more, it feels more familiar, more comfortable and also more immense. And so, too, with the sunset. Ever since dawn, the day has been unfolding. Whatever news has already come, the meals have been made, the school Zooms have started and ended, the daily email from the public health department has arrived. This changing of the light means more now that the day has finished speaking, now that I can start to think about what it said.
*
Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, but for me, it’s a bit of an occasion — the last yard maintenance chore of the year, a year in which we successfully managed to not get evicted for our slovenly lawncare habits. Now winter can just bury everything, allowing us to forget about watering, mowing, raking, or seeding for the next, oh, five months. In celebration of this mundane milestone, I’m re-upping a post from last autumn, about how our peaceful protest against society’s lawn obsession nearly got us booted from our home. Enjoy — and, crap, I just realized I need to shovel the sidewalk…
***
The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway.
How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance.
He took off his sunglasses. Well, I’ve been better. Then he handed me the Notice to Vacate.
It was, truthfully, a well-earned eviction. When Elise and I had moved into our rental, a two-bedroom with a capacious back yard, a year earlier, we’d been given just one inviolable command: keep the grass looking sharp. Let the plumbing rust, the shutters slough off, the paint peel, you name it — but the lawn, our landlord instructed, was to remain sacrosanct, as verdant and groomed as the greens at Augusta.
Aesthetically, the request was reasonable: It was only natural our landlord would want his property to match the others on our leafy street. Climatically, though, it was absurd. Spokane gets around 16 inches of precipitation per year, less than half the national average. A lawn, in our semi-arid corner of the Northwest, is an extravagance. Each evening, as I watched the sprinklers vomit water over our pointless, decorative crop, I burned with environmental shame — whatever you call the hydrologic equivalent of flygskam.
And, fine, it also just came to feel like a hell of a lot of work: Who’d voluntarily spend even twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon shoving around a deafening John Deere?
After a few months, we began to let the lawn slide. Skilled self-justifiers, we recast our laziness as civil disobedience.Burn your hoses! Scrap your mowers! We would, we vowed, create an urban jungle through benign neglect.
We were, of course, very late arrivers to the anti-grass rebellion (which, alas, doesn’t appear to be making much progress). “Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly,” lamented Michael Pollan in a 1989 essay. Lawns — “nature under culture’s boot,” as Pollan memorably put it — are America’s largest irrigated crop, guzzling more water than corn, wheat, and orchards combined. You can find equally appalling statistics about chemical inputs, gasoline spillage, habitat loss. At the very least, every wasted square inch of Kentucky bluegrass comes at a steep opportunity cost. When desperate butterflies have to seek sustenance from ragged strips of roadside milkweed, you know you’ve seriously screwed up the landscape.
***
Our laissez-faire subversion began promisingly enough. Nourished by April rains, our backyard grew luxuriant as a pre-colonial Kansas prairie. Each morning our dog vanished into the sumptuous pasture, her whereabouts betrayed only by the canopy’s rustling, as though she were the monster in a horror movie set among cornfields. As the days lengthened we drank beer on the back porch and watched our stems sway in unison, tousled by spring breezes like kelp in the surf.
As summer wore on, our little patch of tall-grass paradise began to senesce. The lawn brittled, its brown stems snapping at their bases under their seedheads’ weight. Keeled-over stalks somehow knitted together into a dense, reedy mat of dogshit-strewn straw. It looked less like a prairie and more like, well, a vacant and highly flammable lot.
For all its flagrant unattractiveness,though, it was still ecologically rich, or so we rationalized: picked over by our resident house sparrows, furrowed by rodents, brightened by the occasional cedar waxwing. It was an eyesore, sure, but to our wild neighbors, it was a refuge.
Now, our landlord’s letter rattling in my hand, I begged for clemency. We can fix this, I pleaded. Give us a week.
He shook his head. I don’t even know how you’re going to cut it, he said. You’d need a scythe. He sighed, considered, put his sunglasses back on. I’ll be back next Wednesday for another inspection, he said at last. I want this place completely transformed. Then he was gone. We’d received a stay of execution.
***
Although the prospect of eviction terrified us, we could take solace in the knowledge that we were not alone. As Kevin Kelley griped in High Country News this summer, the care of countless rental homes in the arid West falls to tenants who, for all their love of xeriscaped pollinator gardens, have no landscaping authority themselves. When Kelley quit watering his lawn in Boise, his landlord kept his security deposit and charged him for yardwork. Sighed Kelley:
I drove by the property a few weeks later. Everything but the grass patches and oldest trees was gone. Without shade from the elms or groundcover, sunlight cooked the dirt into dust. The landlord’s mission to bring the land back to a monocultured lot negated any environmental good I thought I had done.
Our own landlord’s ultimatum likewise dispelled any delusion that we were masters of our own domain. The next week passed in a blur of weeding, mowing, seeding, and other gardening gerunds. Neither Elise nor I had ever been yard people, and I shudder to think where we would have been without generous friends and instructional YouTube videos (“how to thread a weed-whacker,” in particular, turned out to be a surprisingly robust subgenre). When this story is optioned for cinema, here’s where we’ll slot the inspirational montage — sweat beading our brows as we lug mulch bags to “Eye of the Tiger.”
If I’d had any doubts about the lunacy of lawns, our crash course put them to rest. We dumped fertilizer and non-native seed on the bare patches, poured gas can after gas can into a borrowed mower, and turned our sprinklers on 24-7 blast, undoing a year of water conservation in a single binge of flood irrigation. Worst of all was the infernal weed-whacker, whose whirling nylon string, I learned (and, yes, I probably should have known this already) disintegrates as it flays your vegetation, spitting microplastics into the environment like a machine gun. All we were missing was Agent Orange.
The heavy artillery did its brutal work. Over a week, our enclave of habitat vanished, replaced by a tidy square of suburban conformity. Vivid green replaced dust-brown with an almost miraculous alacrity.A week after our spree began, our landlord returned as promised.He sidled up to the fence and peered over, inscrutable as ever.
What do you think, I asked with trepidation.
Looks good, he said, and permitted his face to relax into a thin smile.Thanks for taking the bull by the horns.We shook hands, and with that he was back in his SUV, off to wrangle the next cabal of dissidents.
Our largely self-inflicted ordeal was over. I admit it: I felt a twinge of guilty pride at having brought the earth to heel. We’d imposed our will upon nature, beaten back the elements, and learned a few practical domestic skills along the way. Even Pollan had confessed some satisfaction at “the sense of order restored that a new-cut lawn exhales… mowing the lawn is, in both a real and metaphorical sense, how I keep the forest at bay and preserve my place in this landscape.”
Mostly, though, I felt — what’s the word? — sad. I’d preserved my own place at the expense of everyone else’s. Weed-whacking the base of our garage one day, I’d found a delicate praying mantis the color of dry hay, its famous forelegs folded in what looked, in that moment, like supplication. I’d watched it roam across my palm before placing it in an untended strip of brush next door. Then, with my gas-powered microplastic disperser, I’d flattened its habitat.
When I look in the mirror, though everything is mildly blurry, I can’t not see the signs of aging I used to think might miraculously skip me—back when I was being carded in bars (at 43!!). But there they all are, the sags and swollen bits, the divots and wrinkles, the spots and stiff (and very sudden) stray hairs. (Silver lining of the pandemic? Masks. The bigger the better.)
I know, I know…I’ve complained about these annoyances before, yadda yadda, and the denial, anger, begging, and sadness should be long over; I should just accept what can’t be changed, embrace it, even. But I’m still treading water between pissed off and pleading. Damn you, roly-poly extra-padded parts and damn you, parts that are all skin, no pad! Damn you 50+ neck, you abomination! (If you tighten up I promise to stop denying the duct tape-belly roll incident, as a public service.)
How unfortunate, too, is the fate of the nose and ears when you add time to the mix. I’d always heard they look bigger on older people because they never stop growing, but the truth is more tragic: They look supersize because gravity is a monkey that swings from every appendage, and after decades the cartilage finally breaks down and gives in to the stretch and droop. Far-reaching schnoz and earlobes like clown feet? It’s my destiny. (I’ve seen the photos of my Granny. Bless her heart.)
Meanwhile, you’d think after so many years looking at animals this would have occurred to me sooner, but here is my new revelation: The traits I hate the most in my aging self are, on other animals, friggin’ adorable. Have you seen a basset hound’s ears? A panda’s tummy? A baby elephant’s scribbly skin and a mastiff’s low-hanging jowls? Does anyone see an eagle’s beak and think “she should have gotten that done years ago”? I submit that no one has.
If I were truly brave I’d juxtapose the following images with pictures of the relevant parts on myself, but I’m choosing to leave it to your imagination. Now, try to be nice.
I was pretty sure the sky was flat, like a cap or a lid or a ceiling. I didn’t think about the sun going up, around, and down; or the moon changing shape; or the constellations moving to different neighborhoods. I was curious about other things, not the sky.
The first time I thought about the sky as living in more than two dimensions was when I was in my teens and babysitting a smart little kid. “Did you ever think that when you’re looking up into the sky,” she said, “you’re seeing infinity?” I was struck dumb. I mean, you couldn’t see Chicago and it was only 30 miles away. And all you had to do to see infinity was look up. I knew the reason for this — I was standing on the surface of a curved planet, I couldn’t see around the curve but because I was on the surface, I could see straight up. But the kid wasn’t talking about the reason, only about the infinity itself. I don’t know what I said to the kid, I hope it was a compliment. I thought about that for years off and on, mostly off.
The next time I thought about the depth of the sky was after I became, for reasons that are still opaque to me, a science writer. I was interviewing an astronomer and he took me to the room where old glass plates of the sky were stored – in the olden days astronomers took pictures of the sky on thick silvered glass plates and universities and institutes still have collections of them. I didn’t know why the astronomer wanted me to see the plates, probably just because he liked them. He handed me a little magnifying viewer, pointed to a dark speck on one of the plates and said, “Here, look at this.” I did. The dark speck against a light background — the plate was essentially a photographic negative — was a galaxy. It was a tiny, perfect, black spiral in a pale grey universe. A whole galaxy. A spiral full of suns, hundreds of billions of suns, way the hell out there. A photograph of a galaxy. A photo? The galaxy was real? REAL? Struck dumb again.
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith?
Monoöbelisk.
Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife biologists, a friend sent coordinates and told me to zoom in close. I did and saw a peculiarly straight shadow in the back of a shallow bedrock canyon. Apparently it had been there for years and no one noticed. He’d found the site. We came up with a plan, a couple days out camping on red slickrock, exploring this metal pillar and its surrounding terrain at our leisure. The place is a labyrinth of sandstone possibilities, the same as about a hundred miles in all directions. Why there? Who cares?
The next morning it got out on YouTube. The Colbert Report already had it in the files, ready for a monologue. Helicopters were arriving. On Facebook, a friend posted a picture of his teenage daughter, an avid rock climber, sitting atop of this unpermitted, Banksy-esque installation.
We dropped our plans. Sour grapes. Crowds aren’t our thing.
I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from someone who found something meaningful or even life-changing in my book. A guy recently sent me a photo of himself hugging my book and I swooned. Praise like this happens with surprising regularity, and it nourishes my writerly soul.
Of course, not all feedback is positive, yet I’m genuinely interested in critical feedback that teaches me something or offers a different perspective. But Amazon reviews, well, a lot of them are something else entirely.
Here is the summary of my customer reviews on Amazon:
These numbers seem pretty good, right? I mean, 84 percent of reviewers give it at least 4 stars! So let’s scroll down and see those reviews. Oh cool! It begins with the top review.
This guy found it depressing that I debunked bogus recovery methods (the book’s stated purpose), and 50 people found that review helpful.
Two stars, wrote “Timmy Miller” — “Chapter after chapter…only to conclude that science is hard.” The two star rating aside, this one gave me a little thrill. Yay, I thought. You got my message! If I had one ambition for the book it was for readers to come away from it understanding something about the complexities of the scientific process and why it’s so difficult to get definitive answers. Maybe Timmy didn’t like my message, but I’m satisfied that he received it nonetheless.
Moving up to 3-star reviews, we find “Dangfool,” who thought my book was “Kinda boring and too technical.” “David L” also gave me 3-stars, calling it “Not so deep.”
I have to wonder what motivates someone to leave that kind of commentary. It’s easy to understand the impulse to leave a negative review after dropping $30 on a book that’s truly terrible. But why take the time to pan a book you find merely mediocre?
The New York Times once assigned me to review a new book that sounded really exciting. Then I read it and discovered that it was thin on research and sloppy in its execution. The author was not some snobby somebody worth punching up to, and the book wasn’t terrible enough to warrant a takedown. So I told my editor that it wasn’t worthy of a Times review, and killed the assignment.
The thing about book writing is that even when it’s going well, it can be difficult, soul-crushing work. When someone has spent a substantial amount of time pouring their heart into a book, writing a bad review feels is like calling someone’s baby ugly. It might be true, but do you need to shout it aloud?
My favorite reviews are the ones that wink at what the reader took away. Like this one over at Goodreads, where “Katharine” wrote a review flicking to the human impulse to dismiss evidence we don’t like: “Although she presented peer-reviewed literature on the matter, I do not believe Christie Aschwanden when she says that stretching does nothing at all.”
Which gets me to the one thing crappy Amazon reviews seem to have one thing in common: the reviewer is mad the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind.
Consider this 1-star review of Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy, which calls it “Boring with a feminist agenda.” “This book basically just gives examples of how the penis and mating process vary across the animal kingdom, and that relatively little is known about the vagina due to male scientists not caring as much.” In fact, that’s a fairly decent overview, even if “Amazon Customer” didn’t like it.
“Cynical Yorkshireman” gave Annalee Newitz’s book Autonomous 1-star. “Badly infected with gender identity nonsense…My copy (see attached picture) is on its way to be recycled.” Yes, the reviewer included a photo of the book in the recycling bin. Not just cynical, that Yorkshireman, but also mean.
Amazon reviewers love to ding authors for things their books never purported to be. Take, for instance, this complaint by a reviewer of one of LaWONian Ann Finkbeiner’s books. “The author may be a respected science historian, but she has clearly not put much effort into political history.” Ann says that in fact, she is “not an historian in any way, let alone a science historian.” At least that reviewer read the book.
Some guy gave my friend Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure one star, saying “I bought this book as a gift for my daughter…I know she received the book but have not heard further…Sorry I can’t be more helpful.” Apparently it didn’t occur to him that it would have been far more helpful to everybody if he had not given a star rating to a book he hadn’t read.
It seems not everyone understands that the review is supposed to be of the actual book. Consider the person who gave Nick Harkaway’s book, The Gone Away World, a 1-star review because it arrived damaged from Amazon.
Spare a thought for LWON’s own Richard Panek. One of his books received an Amazon review that said “It is a crap.” Which Richard found quite disappointing. “If my book is crap, I want it to be at least the crap.”
I feel him. I’ve noticed that almost all of my negative reviews make some version of the same complaint: I came to this book hoping to find the magic secret to athletic recovery, but Christie told me that most of the things marketed to me are snake oil and that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.
These critiques make me shake my head a little, but they don’t get under my skin. My book isn’t for everybody, and that’s ok with me. I’ve discovered that the people who do love my book are amazing. Until I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked at my reviews in a very long time, and as scanned the bad ones for examples, I found something truly delightful. In multiple cases, total strangers had jumped in to defend me from stupid reviews. In response to a 1-star review in which the reviewer said that “I would never buy this book,” someone replied to say “Kudos on literally admitting you didn’t read the book. Reported.”
Another 1-star review that says, “This author writes well enough to pass as a scientist but is not actually a scientist,” and then instructed people to go read another book instead. To which some other kind reader replied, “I am a scientist and found this book an excellent review of the relevant material.”
I don’t know who any of these people are, but it warms my heart to learn that there are readers who have found my book and liked it enough to defend it. Haters gonna hate, but they can’t drown out the love.
Illustrations by Sarah Gilman. Words by Christie Aschwanden.
I am alone as I write this, as I have been most days the last eight months. There are many things I know I miss: french fries fresh out of a restaurant kitchen, killing time in a bookstore. Other deficits have been more subtle, things I know aren’t available to me right now but that I haven’t consciously desired, like eating at an airport Chili’s. (Don’t get me wrong — I love a good Chili’s, but the airport ones are always disappointing.)
Also on that list: the little observations about my friends that make me feel a part of their lives, like having a bourbon at a friend’s house and noticing their new plant, or going to a wedding and noticing how much the bride’s mom resembles her aunts. Lately, the cumulative lack has finally made itself known, like how anemia can take hold after years of iron deficiency — and as a result, I’m looking for tender details everywhere.
